


all i have to do is dream

by buckgaybarnes



Category: Indiana Jones Series, Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: (and also a teeny-tiny sex scene), (mild and no character experiences it on-screen), Action Movie Logic, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Indiana Jones Crossover, Cults, Dream Sharing, Kaiju (Pacific Rim), M/M, Mutual Pining, Mystery! Romance! International Intrigue!, Paleontologist Newt, Passionate and Fascinating Exchange of Letters, Period-Typical Homophobia, Rated M for Melodrama
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-06-30 12:03:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19852780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckgaybarnes/pseuds/buckgaybarnes
Summary: When Newt's former penpal turns up missing with nothing but an incomprehensible journal and a ransacked apartment left behind, Newt gets a lot more than he bargained for when he agrees to help the handsome archaeologist across the hall track him down.(or: an EXTREMELY self-indulgent crossover that's also maybe mostly a vehicle for newt/hermann tenderness)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> well this one is a doozy. originally written, out of pure self-indulgence, february 2018 (meant to be a continuation of the "newt is wooed by hunky academics" cinematic universe begun with the JP fic), i finally decided to finish this bad boy up for posting. total word count is, at my estimation, at aboutttttt 20k words, but i'll be editing the rest between posting so it may be more or less--same with chapters!
> 
> i worked VERY HARD on the minute historical details in this lmfao. fic dedicated to exactly three people. You Know Who You Are
> 
> title will make more sense as you read on!

**** **1937**

Bedford may still be New England, and even technically still _Boston_ (a whole whopping thirty minutes away), but it's a drag compared to what Newt’s used to, and it’s why he’s decided to hate it and toil away each hour spent here in misery. He recognizes he’s being unfair—petty, even—and it’s almost entirely a decision colored by spite, but frankly, he’s of the opinion he’s allowed. Considering the capital-c Circumstances.

Newt's been up here for four months, lecturing for over three, and he got antsy his second week in. He thinks it’s the closeness that’s getting to him. The proximity to where he _really_ wants to be. He wishes they would’ve sent him to New York or something, maybe somewhere halfway across the country. _Out_ of the country. He would’ve embraced the deal with open arms, and not merely out of necessity. Marshall College needed him though, apparently, to boost their paleontology department that’s almost as extinct as the subject matter—the Dean (nice guy, friend of MIT’s own) asked for him, specifically, after his work in Tanzania, and Newt's not exactly, well, _popular_ at MIT right now, not after certain indiscretions on his part, and they were more than happy to get rid of him without causing a scandal. Newt was, after all, their golden boy. Still counts for something. 

He doesn't think his co-workers like him here too much; he gets disapproving looks for his wild hair, his scuffed leather jacket, the dirt perpetually caked onto his combat boots, his round-cheeked baby face that makes him seem like more of a delinquent twenty-something than the celebrated academic he is. Not to mention the tattoos. (He overheard some literature professor call him _disgraceful_ to a colleague his first week in. At least his students kind of like him.)

Work is a bit of a drag, too. There’s barely anyone to talk to. Newt constitutes the entire paleontology department, save for a single adjunct who comes in on Tuesday evenings to talk about plants for an hour, but they've crammed the archaeology department in alongside him on the same floor. Since the two are so similar, _apparently_. Maybe there's some truth to it—digging up old shit in the dirt, no matter if it's bones or pottery, follows the same general set of guidelines of “don’t break it”.

Anyway, Newt is being kind when he calls the archaeology department a department. It's just one man, just like him, even if the guy’s classes are shockingly much more well attended than Newt's and kids flock to his office hours in droves. Newt's lucky if he gets even half of his enrolled students to show up to a lecture, regardless of how much they kind of like him; the archaeologist usually has to turn people away.

Newt thinks he knows why. It’s not because of the subject.

The archaeologist is called Jones, and he's handsome in a way that makes Newt's tongue feel like it's been knotted up and like his legs have turned to jelly. He's scruffy (a look that Newt can never seem to pull off successfully), wears tweed and little round glasses, and has got a nice air of charm about him. And a bit of an edge, too, or so rumor has it. Newt's heard his students whisper about the adventures Dr. Jones gets up too, the excavations across the globe, the sword-fighting, the Nazi-punching, but it's hard to reconcile the Dr. Jones worthy of his own radio serial with the Dr. Jones whose bow tie is always a little crooked and whose glasses are always a bit smudged. Newt can dream, though. (And he likes to. Extensively. Especially when they involve Jones rescuing him from pirates, and Newt being _so_ grateful, and then—)

It's two months before Newt actually talks to Dr. Jones, beyond a perfunctory morning _hello_ or evening _see you tomorrow_ or little nods when they pass each other in the hall _._ He's been content to pine from afar in the meantime. But—two months, an unmarried guy with no lady friends, and especially when it’s a guy with Jones’s looks—Newt's gotta wonder. Hope, maybe. He's had enough time to get over his dalliance with the handsome classics professor at MIT that cost him his cushy job, and _much_ more time to get over—well. Not important now. He's lonely, so sue him.

It's a Friday night, and it's just the two of them in this wing of the university; Newt's just finishing picking over a handful of academic journals he had force himself to catch up on, and the steady stream of students coming and going from Dr. Jones's office has finally died out until, finally, the last straggler is calling goodbye. Newt casts a glance out the window. Dusk. Dinnertime, probably. He can’t remember if he ate today. He brushes a bit of dirt off his shoulder that he’s not quite clear on the origins of, tries in vain to clean his glasses on the rolled cuff of his shirt, and waltzes across the hall to Dr. Jones's office. He knocks once. Dr. Jones doesn't look up from an old-looking journal he's pouring over—decidedly not academic in origin, like Newt’s had been.

"Office hours are over," he says, flipping over a page, "can’t it wait ‘til Monday?"

"It can't, actually," Newt says, and enjoys the way Dr. Jones quickly looks up, blinking in surprise.

"Dr. Geiszler?" Newt doesn't miss the way he quickly closes the book and slides it off to the side, falsely casual, until the cover is partially obscured by a bit of newspaper. It's worn and leather. Not that it's any of Newt's business. He forces himself to drag his eyes away. He wants to make a _good impression_ , one that doesn’t involve immediately prying into the guy’s personal affairs and coming off a creep.

"I was wondering if you wanted to get dinner or something?" Dr. Jones looks at him blankly; embarrassed, Newt adds in a rush, "It's just, it's late, and I haven't eaten, and I know you've been busy too. I thought I’d ask."

"I'd _like_ to," Dr. Jones says, "but—" He casts a glance down at the journal. Newt follows his gaze. 

Newt thinks of the stories he’s heard his students whisper among themselves. He hopes this is part of something exciting, too. "Catching up on reading?" He smiles. "No worries, pal."

Dr. Jones debates for a moment longer, and then shoots Newt a smile of his own that has the tips of Newt’s ears growing warm. "It can wait," he says, and slips the journal into the pocket of his tweed. "Not often I get a dinner invitation from someone who shares my habits. Especially not from someone with as impressive a reputation as you, Dr. Geiszler."

Newt's heart skips a beat. "Habits?"

"Digging around in the dirt,” Jones says, smile widening. He stands up and pockets his glasses as well. He looks less the professor type without them and more, well, a man worthy of the legends. Also, of course, _really_ handsome.

"Right," Newt says, hoping Jones can’t see his blush. "Of course."

"Where'd you have in mind for dinner?" Dr. Jones says, buttoning up his blazer. He grabs a fedora off the coat rack to the side of the doorway.

"I—" Truthfully, Newt hadn't planned on getting this far. "I think there's a few pubs nearby? I don't know how good they are—"

Dr. Jones hums. He looks at Newt very, very thoughtfully. "We could just go back to _my_ place."

  
Dr. Jones makes them martinis, which Newt is delighted by, despite the fact that he’s sincerely been trying to cut back on his life-uprooting inspired drinking as of late. (He'd been expecting whiskey, or something else boring and served in tumblers that he’d have to pretend to be impressed at the year of.) There's not much in the way of food besides the olives in their glasses, but Dr. Jones scrounges up some pretzels from his kitchen with an apology and an explanation that he needs to pick up more groceries. Newt’s fine with it. It’s the company he wanted, anyway—he felt like he was going nuts without anyone over the age of twenty to talk to. And they do talk: they talk about their research (though Newt has a feeling Jones is deliberately avoiding getting into his best bits), their travels, how Newt’s liking it here, the damn weather, even. Major morale boost. Newt’s feeling like his usual chipper, obnoxious, loud-mouthed self already.

"Newt, by the way," he says after they've each had a second martini and everything’s getting a little nice and warm. He's kicked his legs up on the coffee table, loosened his tie, unbuttoned his top two buttons. No harm in making himself comfortable. "I can’t remember if I said. Don't worry about the Doctor shit. It just makes me feel—” He waves his hand, forgetting himself, and his drink slops over the sides of his glass and onto his jeans. “—Old. Oh."

Jones smirks a bit, taking in Newt's disheveled appearance, the stain spreading over his knee. Yeah, Newt's kind of a lightweight. So sue him. He’s small. "Indiana," Jones says. "Or Indy. No one calls me Henry."

"I like the name Henry," Newt says. He sets down his martini glass and takes off his tie entirely, with half a mind to use it to mop up the booze. Jones's eyes go to his throat.

"How lucky for me," he says. He leans in and rests a hand on Newt's thigh.

Habits, Newt thinks.

  
  
It's casual. It’s fun. It’s a little fumbling. Jones presses him down against the sofa, rucks up their undershirts to expose their bare chests and abdomens (and boy, does Newt feel inadequate in that regard), mouths hot practiced kisses up Newt's neck, and Newt gasps and clutches at Jones's back, his sandy-blonde hair, his sturdy biceps. His scruff is tickling him. Newt knocks his head against the armrest more than once. “This is swell,” Newt sighs happily, fighting the insane urge to giggle. He’s not sure where his glasses went. “This is really—”

Jones kisses the corner of his mouth; Newt takes the hint and closes it. “You usually this talkative, honey?” Jones says, but he sounds amused, at least, not annoyed. He swallows Newt’s moan with a kiss as he falls apart a moment later.

Jones wanders off in search of a clean towel when they've both caught their breath, and Newt remains sprawled against the cushions, sated but a little sweaty. Newt really _did_ have fun. He likes Jones, and he likes his weird house, too—the piles of dusty papers everywhere, the bookcases stuffed with statuettes and volumes older than Newt, the dozens of photographs of a younger Jones in far-off places tacked to his walls that Newt is dying to ask about—likes both enough to hope that this isn’t a one time thing. He hopes it lasts. He hopes he won’t be so—

Jones has left his tweed coat tossed across the opposite arm of the sofa, and the edge of the journal peeks out from the inner pocket. 

"No," Newt tells himself sternly. It's none of his business. "Do not—"

He reaches in and pulls it out. It's not as old as he expected—ten years, tops, just a little well-loved—and it's a nice, sturdy leather. A brief flip through it reveals it's part diary, part— _something_. Research, maybe. Complicated equations and weird diagrams of things Newt has to turn the journal sideways and upside-down to even attempt to comprehend. That's not what's surprising, though, what’s making Newt’s heart pound a little faster than it should.

What's surprising is that Newt knows the handwriting as intimately as he knows his own.

Jones walks back into the room with the towel slung over his shoulder, shirtless and smiling lazily, but his expression contorts to suspicion in a matter of seconds when he realizes what Newt's holding. "What are you—?"

Newt waves it at him. "Why do you have Hermann Gottlieb's journal?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the drama of it all.......next chapter to come over the weekend, probably, but find me on twitter at hermanngaylieb and tumblr at hermannsthumb until then!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a black car parked outside Newt's house, and Newt's been having the weirdest dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the DRAMAAAAAAA
> 
> genuinely i hope this is good, i wrote this fic well over a year ago and well before i had a good grasp on writing newt + hermann lmao so

Newt hasn’t been privy to many interrogations, so he can’t say for sure, but this has definitely got to be at the top of the list for _abnormal_ ones. Aside from the “we were just doing things not thirty minutes ago” factor, Jones didn’t even give him time to re-dress before starting the third degree, so he’s in nothing but mismatching socks, vaguely damp shorts, and his thin undershirt. “How do you know Dr. Gottlieb?” Jones asks him over and over.

“I could ask you the same question, pal,” Newt huffs, struggling valiantly to re-button his crumpled oxford. He’d like to preserve a bit of modesty, thanks. Also, he’s started getting a little chilly. “Running around with his _diary_.”

Jones levels him with a look. Newt swallows around a sudden lump in his throat. He doesn’t like talking about Hermann Gottlieb—hasn’t talked about him, not in _ages_ —but Jones has cornered him on the sofa in a distinctly un-sexy fashion, and Newt has a feeling he might pull a gun on him or tie him up or something if he doesn’t start cooperating fast. “Fine. We were—colleagues, technically. We haven’t spoken in years.”

Jones raises an eyebrow. “Colleagues?” He flips, slowly and deliberately, through the journal. “You must have a pretty damn good memory to recognize a _colleague’s_ handwriting that easily.”

Newt colors, fumbling a button. “Look, we were _penpals_ , okay? We wrote letters for four years. I only met the guy once. We lost touch after, uh—” He drops his gaze to the floor. “Frankly, he was a bit of a square, in person, and he didn’t like me very much, so.” It’s not the whole truth, or really the truth at all, but Jones doesn’t need to know specifics—how funny Newt’s stomach felt when he got that very first airmail letter singing praises of his research, how intimately he came to know every inch of Hermann Gottlieb’s life over the following four years, how wide and empty and sad the world seemed once they ceased contact. “I don’t dwell on it,” he adds. This is also not the truth.

Jones’s features cloud with confusion, but only for a moment. “ _Oh_ ,” he says, and moves his arm so he’s not boxing Newt in anymore. Newt breathes a little sigh of relief and does his shirt up the rest of the way. Guess he said the right thing. “Of course. You’re Newton.”

“Um. Yes?” Newt never goes by his full name, not if he can help it, but he’s always assumed it’s pretty obvious what _Newt_ is short for.

“Gottlieb talks about you in this,” Jones says, and shakes the diary. “A _lot_.”

“He does?” Newt says, probably too quickly, and colors a bit more. All these years and he’s still so fucking hung up on the guy. Pathetic. Still—he wishes he’d paid more attention to what Hermann wrote about him when he flipped through it. Could’ve given him a little closure, at the very least, to know if Hermann really did end up hating him.

The oddness of the situation finally dawns on him. Why _does_ Jones have Hermann’s diary? “Hold on,” he says, “where did you...?”

He lets the sentence trail off, unfinished; Jones avoids Newt’s eyes.

Newt’s blood runs cold.

“He’s not—?” He would’ve heard, wouldn’t he, if Hermann had—? He would’ve read about it in the paper? Someone would’ve contacted Newt? They’d been _friends_ , for God’s sake. Someone would’ve thought to contact Newt.

“Missing,” Jones clarifies, all gentle, like it’s supposed to make Newt feel better. It doesn’t. The metaphorical knife in his gut only twists the opposite way— _missing_ could mean a whole lot of things. “Only missing. Friend of mine worked— _works_ —with him at Oxford. Said he was acting a bit strange for a while, and then he just stopped showing up for lectures. They broke into his flat after a week and the place’d been ransacked. No sign of your pal.”

“Oh,” Newt says, because it’s all he can think to say.

“They found the journal jammed under the mattress,” Jones continues, “like he tried to hide it in a hurry. I’ve been through it—favor for my friend—and I can’t see anything that would tell us _why_ he’d have to hide it, but...” Jones waits a bit, and then adds, “Did Gottlieb have any enemies, Newt?”

“Enemies? _Hermann_?” Newt snorts, even through his weird, catatonic state. “I mean, he’s a grumpy bastard, but, no way he has actual enemies. He was always—antisocial. I’m pretty sure I’m the longest relationship he’s ever had.”

“You sure?” Jones says.

Newt nods slowly. “How—how long has he been missing, anyway?” He’s not sure he wants to know.

“Two months,” Jones says. He looks apologetic.

“Oh, Hermann,” Newt sighs.

* * *

Jones drives him home, at least. Newt can’t say it’s the _best_ evening he’s ever spent with a man: bringing up old flames only to reveal they’ve vanished from the face of the planet would kill even the best of moods, but Jones is still unfairly _good-looking_ and his kisses made Newt light-headed, so it counts for something. Solid seven points out of ten. 

“Let me know if you hear from Gottlieb,” Jones makes Newt promise before Newt hops out of Jones’s way-too-nice automobile. A light drizzle has begun to fleck Newt’s glasses—nothing too terrible, not yet, but Newt gives himself a mental reminder to shut his windows anyway in case it picks up.

“Let me know if you _find_ him,” Newt shoots back. Besides, fat chance that Hermann would write to him even if his life _is_ on the line. Jones nods, once, and waves goodbye before he drives off into the night.

Newt’s left standing in front of his apartment, alone, and cold, and confused, and missing Hermann, just a little bit, in a way he hasn’t in two years.

* * *

He has all of Hermann’s letters wrapped in twine and stuffed into a series of hat boxesin his bedroom closet, because he couldn’t think of where else to put them after their friendship turned to nothing and it was quite clear Newt wouldn’t be hearing from him again. Newt hasn’t looked at them since, despite toting them along on the the journey here in his limited luggage space. He hasn’t even opened the boxes. He doesn’t need to: he’d re-read them all so much he knows them by heart.

The martinis from Jones have already worn off by the time Newt showers and changes into worn sleep pants, so he cracks open a bottle of wine he bought his first night here—it was supposed to be a goal to achieve, a celebration for when he finished his time here and MIT, hopefully, took him back—and settles in with Box #1. Hermann’s handwriting is slanted, elegant, immaculate, but ink blots the pages wherever he’d gotten excited about something or skewered a bad idea of Newt’s and wrote too fast, and with every curling _Newton_ the metaphorical knife Jones left in his gut twists a little harder. Hermann was the only one who ever called him Newton. It felt, somehow, like more of a fond nickname than _Newt_ could’ve ever been from him. Box #2 marks the point where the tone of the letters turns from guarded, wary interest to open adoration, and when Hermann calls him _profoundly irritating, yet the single most captivating person I’ve ever met_ , Newt downs the rest of the wine.

The last letter Hermann ever sent him is a short, page-long thing that’s little more than a finalization of the details of their meet-up. _I can hardly contain myself_ , Hermann had written, and the ink had blotted on the page. But he’d signed it with _Yours_. A first-and-last time thing. Newt traces the curling, curling Y until he dozes off in his ratty, secondhand armchair.

* * *

**1934**

Hermann is better than Newt’s hoped for. Hermann is—he’s _handsome_ , and built nicely (though he slouches, just a bit), and his clothes are neat but too-big and his hair is ridiculously out of fashion, and his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles (smiles at Newt!), and he shook Newt’s hand for a full minute when they met in the crowded lecture hall an hour earlier.

(“ _Look_ at you,” he said, giving Newt one, two, three once-overs, smile so wide and bright Newt was a little dazed, “by God, it’s _surreal_.”)

So Newt did the gentlemanly thing and invited Hermann up to his hotel room: the third thing out of his mouth after _hello_ and _did you like my talk_. Conversation, drinks, coffee, whatever Hermann wanted. And Newt—well, he thinks the innuendo was pretty obvious. _Captivating_ , Hermann called him. _Yours_. Newt never asked, in all their correspondence, but he’s always thought—always hoped—and Hermann _blushed_ when Newt asked him up. 

“It’s so _strange_ ,” Hermann is saying, while Newt—hands shaking, because he’s _terribly_ nervous—stirs sugar into their teas at the counter of the small kitchenette. “You’re somehow exactly as I pictured you would be, Newton.”

Newt sets their teacups down on the small table and takes the chair opposite Hermann. “I hope that’s a good thing, then,” he says, forcing a nervous smile. 

Hermann laughs, and it’s warm, and Newt’s heart does somersaults. “Of course it is,” he says. He takes a sip of tea, and seems pleasantly surprised to find it sweet; he wrote to Newt how he takes it, once, over a year ago, when they were swapping inconsequential details about their day-to-day lives, and Newt made a point to remember. 

“And you’re—” Newt falters. _Magnificent, handsome, charming._ He drums his fingers on the tabletop. What the hell, he thinks. “Hermann. I have to tell you. I—”

“As excellent as your lecture was,” Hermann interrupts, and he’s—just as nervous, his voice falsely light and conversational, “there were _some_ points I felt were _very_ shoddily researched. You may benefit from—”

“—you don’t have to respond, you just need to know—”

“—a bit outdated, and you hardly supported—”

“I’m in love with you,” Newt blurts out.

Hermann stops talking, but he doesn’t freeze in shock, stagger back in disgust. Newt thinks he would've preferred that to what Hermann actually did. He sighs, sets his teacup down. “Newton,” he says gently, reaching over and stilling Newt’s hand, which has reached a staccato rhythm in its tapping, “we can’t.”

“Can’t _what_ ,” Newt says, searching Hermann’s face for _something_. But he just looks sad. “Don’t you—?”

“Of course,” Hermann says. “Of _course_ I do. I—” He rubs his eyes. Not sad, anymore. Just tired. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s dangerous, Newton. You know that.”

“I don’t _care_ ,” Newt insists, and he clutches at Hermann’s hand before Hermann can withdraw it from where it’s still resting, lightly, atop his knuckles.

“How would we even work?” Hermann says, still so maddeningly gentle, as if Newt is a child, or as if he’s about to break down and start weeping at any moment. “There’s an ocean between us.”

“Letters,” Newt says. “Like _usual_.”

“Post can be intercepted,” Hermann says. “All the risk, without any of—well, frankly, the reward.”

“I’ll quit my job,” Newt says, growing frantic, “and move to England. I can pretend I’m your cousin or something. Hermann. Please.”

“No,” Hermann says, shortly. “The _risk_ —”

“You’re worth it to me.” He’s clutching onto Hermann with both hands now.

Hermann doesn’t speak for a long moment. He pulls his hand away slowly, reaches for where his cane is resting against a table leg, stands up. “Thank you for the tea,” he says, primly, “and conversation. I should—”

In a moment of sheer desperation, Newt springs to his feet and kisses Hermann. For one fantastic second, Hermann melts against him, kissing him back, and it’s everything Newt’s dreamed, and then he’s shoving Newt away. “I wish you hadn’t said anything,” he chokes out. “I wish you’d just—” He’s clutching at Newt’s shirt, looking wild, eyes fixed on Newt’s mouth like he’s going to kiss him again, and Newt thinks _please_ , but the moment is fleeting. Hermann lets go. Stumbles back. “I don’t think we should continue our correspondence.”

“Hermann—”

“It’ll be easier. For both of us. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—” Hermann runs a hand through his hair, mussing up the part. “Take care of yourself,” he says, and he’s gone.

* * *

**1937**

When Newt wakes up, there’s murky daylight streaming through the blinds, his alarm clock is ringing, and he’s got a fucking _horrific_ headache. “Shit,” he groans, squinting against the light—weak and grey as it is, the rain has picked up overnight—as he tries to grope his way across the bedroom to shut the damn clock off. He manages, after two wild swings at his bedside table.

It’s Saturday, and Newt has no lectures or pressing concerns or really _anything_ to attend to, and he wants nothing more than to curl up under his duvet and sleep off his hangover. He goes to shut the blinds, but stops; there’s a strange car parked at the curb. It’s black and the windows are tinted, so it’d be conspicuous even _if_ it weren’t clearly _extremely_ expensive. A speedster, Newt thinks. Not that he knows anything about cars—he never bothered to learn to drive.

Newt watches it for a few minutes. It doesn’t look like it’s running. If there’s anyone inside of it, the tint combined with the sheets of rain are doing a bang-up job of hiding them.

Probably just his neighbor’s rich uncle, or something. Newt doesn’t care enough to linger, and forgets about it the second his head hits his pillow.

* * *

Newt wakes early enough in the evening to eat some cold leftovers from Thursday night’s dinner and have it be a reasonably appropriate time to do so. The rain’s let up somewhat, he notices when he glances out the window. The car’s gone, too. (Just a coincidence after all.)

He does the dishes that had been piling up, sets the empty bottle of wine from last night with the garbage, and gets to work repacking the letters. They’re strewn about the floor, some open, some folded, and it takes everything in him to not flip through them again.

He manages, but still. Hermann is heavy on his mind when he falls back into sleep.

* * *

He dreams of Hermann that night. It’s an old dream, a familiar one, but it’s one he hasn’t had in some three years, not since he packed up the letters for the first time and shoved them far, far out of sight. They’re in the hotel room again, and Newt is clinging to him, frantic, tearful. “You’re worth the risk,” he tells Hermann, and Hermann says nothing.

* * *

The car is back on Sunday. Newt re-reads the letters and eats more cold leftovers and doesn’t move from his bed.

* * *

Newt probably looks a sight when he walks into the university on Monday morning. There are deep shadows under his eyes, he hasn’t shaved in two days, and all he’s had that morning is half a cup of weak instant coffee. Students steer clear of him in the hallway, at least, which means he doesn’t have to force any awkward small talk.

He’s been in his office for all of five minutes when Louise—the senior Literature major who works the front desk at the dean’s office when she’s not in class—knocks on his door. “Good morning, Dr. Geiszler,” she says, cheerful as anything when Newt calls her in, but her smile fades when he pulls his head up from his hands. “Jeez. Are you sick?”

“Just—tired,” Newt says. He waits for Louise to reveal her purpose for hiking all the way down to the paleontology-archaeology department, but when she does nothing but look at him sympathetically, he adds pointedly “Is there something you needed?” Newt likes Louise, but she reminds him a bit too much of himself, and he doesn’t have enough energy to deal with even one of those today.

“Right!” she says. She darts forward and places a small square parcel, wrapped in brown paper and string, on his desk. “This came for you this morning to the front office.”

Newt pulls the parcel closer for a better look, frowning. The address written on it, below his name, is his old apartment, but it’d been forwarded—likely from his former landlady—to MIT, and then finally to here. There’s no return address, but it’s stamped with _Air Mail_. 

Louise is poking her head over his shoulder. “Air mail!” she exclaims, catching sight of the stamp as well. “Who do you know that lives that far away?”

“No one,” Newt says slowly, because—well, Hermann’s _missing_ , isn’t he? Even if he wasn’t, it’s not like he would just send Newt a package out of the blue after _three years._ Still: his heart pounds at the thought. Newt undoes the string and slides the brown paper off to reveal—another journal. “Huh,” he says.

“A book?” Louise says, sounding disappointed. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love books, but I was hoping it’d be more exciting.” Newt doesn’t respond, too busy examining the outside of the journal (the same scuffed leather of the last one), and Louise shrugs. “Hope you feel better, Dr. Geiszler.” She’s half-out the door when she suddenly stops. “Oh. I almost forgot. Some fellows were asking about you at the office last week.”

“Fellows?” Newt says, snapping up.

“Two of them. Fancy clothes. Looked like something out of that Hitchcock flick, with the spies.” Louise lowers her voice conspiratorially. “Did you rob a bank or something?”

“What did they want?” Newt says sharply.

Louise startles at his urgency. “Beats me. They wouldn’t say. They were asking after your address, but I told them I wasn’t allowed to give it out, you know, confidentiality and all.” She frowns. “ _Did_ you rob a bank?”

“Not that I know of,” Newt says. His mouth is dry. Why would anyone need his address? “Louise, can you remember anything else about them?”

“They had a nice car?” she guesses.

“Was it black?”

Louise makes a face, and gives a little shrug. “I think so. I’m sorry, we had about a million people in that day, and your friends left pretty quick when I wouldn’t help them. Just thought I should let you know.”

Newt’s stomach churns unpleasantly. “Thanks,” he says. “I mean it.”

Louise’s frown deepens. “Sure,” she says. “See you later.” She shuts the door with a click.

Newt waits until Louise’s footsteps have faded down the hallway before he opens the front cover. He thinks he should be more surprised to see Hermann’s name scrawled across the left-hand corner, to flip through and see page after page filled with complex diagrams and long, elegant paragraphs in Hermann’s hand, but it’s almost as if he’d been expecting it from the moment he woke up that morning.

He can’t help the prickle of tears at the corner of his eye when he slips an envelope out from between the pages, with a curling, beautiful, familiar _Newton_ written across it, nor the way his hands shake when he slides out Hermann’s letter.

The ink is blotted in some places, the way Newt remembers, and several words have been crossed out and rewritten. It’s dated some two months ago. It’s also cryptic as hell.

 _Newton_ , Hermann writes, _I don’t have much time. Guard this journal, hide it—I fear what could happen if it fell into the wrong hands. You’re the only one I can trust._ (A sentence is scratched out here.) _There are many things I should have said to you that day, many choices I should have made differently. If I ever see you again, I won’t make the same mistakes. Yours, eternally, Hermann._

What did Hermann _do_?

Newt paces outside Dr. Jones’s office until he can’t put it off any longer and knocks, loud and firm, on the door. He barely waits for a “Come in” before he’s pushing it open. “He sent me this,” Newt says, brandishing the journal. “It’s got a lot more math and shit than the other one. Is that important?” He’s talking a mile a minute. He waves the letter around too. “It looks like he sent it right before they got him. They? Is it one person? I just got it now because he only had my old address.”

He pauses for breath, and it’s only then he realizes that Dr. Jones has a student with him, a kid Newt recognizes from one of his own Tuesday/Thursday seminars.

“Uh. Hi, Dr. Geiszler,” the kid—mildly bewildered—says.

“Andrew,” Jones says, sliding off his glasses and folding them up neatly, “could you come back in an hour?”

The kid nods, picks up his bag, and bids them both an awkward goodbye. When the door clicks shut, the polite professorly smile falls from Jones’s face and he ushers Newt over to his side. He flips through the journal while Newt picks up where he left off. “Why would he bother sending me this one,” Newt says, “and leave the other one in his apartment where they might’ve found it?”

“Beats me,” Jones says. He snaps the journal shut. “Can I hold onto this?”

 _You’re the only one I can trust_. “No,” Newt says slowly. Twenty minutes ago, going to Dr. Jones seemed like the only smart option, but now? Newt barely knows the guy beyond martinis and the elaborate adventure stories his students have weaved on slow class days. For all he knows, Jones is the reason why Hermann’s missing in the first place. “No, he—Hermann sent it to me to hold onto. I’d—”

“Geiszler,” Jones says, patiently, “if someone took your—” his eyes flick down to the letter, which Newt’s also handed over, and Newt covers it instinctively— “ _penpal_ , they could _very easily_ follow the paper trail to you. Four yearsworth of letters?”

“But he only has my old address,” Newt says. “They couldn’t—”

“It’s safer with me,” Jones says, clearly fighting back irritation. “This is what I _do._ ” He doesn’t try to stop Newt from tugging the journal and letter back, though, only sighs. “Fine. Just be careful.”

Newt cancels his late office hours that day so he can walk back to his apartment while it’s still light out; Jones offered to drive him home again, but Newt was too wary to accept. The journal and letter are hidden carefully in the inner pocket of Newt’s leather jacket, and he avoids his usual shortcut through a thick copse of trees in the park to keep to crowded sidewalks instead. _You’re being paranoid_ , he tells himself, but he can’t get Hermann’s frantic, shaking handwriting out of his head. The black car is parked out by the curb again when Newt finally jogs up his driveway, and it sends a chill down his spine this time. He locks the door behind him, and retreats to a dark corner of his bedroom, blinds drawn again.

There’s nothing really much different about this journal from the last one at first glance, only—a brief glance shows—as Newt had told Jones earlier, there _are_ a lot more diagrams (none of which Newt can comprehend), and Newt is mentioned a _lot_ more. He reads the whole thing through, heart pounding every time Hermann casually drops his name (complaining about _Newton_ , bragging about _Newton’s_ achievements, wanting nothing more than to see _Newton_ ), and it’s not until he finishes he realizes how dark it’s gotten, how his eyes are straining, how his stomach is growling. According to his alarm clock, it’s four in the morning; he’s been at it for nearly twelve hours.

The entries stopped having a personal aspect towards the end, moving strictly into long equations, elaborate phrases in something like Old English that look as though they’ve been copied from something ancient, strange sketches of serpentine beasts, a _fixation_ on something Hermann refers to only as _the drift_ —these start, actually, after the incident at the hotel room. (There is a single sentence that from that day, a sentence that Newt spent an hour reading over and over, tracing with his fingertips, repeating in little more than a whisper: _I love him, and I am tired_.)

There’s nothing, however, that would indicate why Hermann’s suddenly dropped off the face of the earth, or who’s responsible for it, or why he sent Newt a diary that’s essentially half-barely legible ravings and half-love letter to Newt with instructions to _guard it_. 

He dreams fitfully again that night: the hotel room and Hermann, only it ends differently. “You’re worth the risk,” he’s begging, and then Hermann is the one clutching at _him_.

“Wake up,” he urges Newt, as wild as he’d been after Newt kissed him, “Newton, wake up _now_.” He gives Newt a hard shove.

Newt startles awake in the same armchair as Saturday morning, catching the journal just before it hits the floor; it’s still pitch black, so he can’t have been asleep for more than an hour. Hermann had been so—vivid.

He doesn’t have too much time to dwell, though, because there are footsteps in his kitchen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more soon......................


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt and Indy pay Hermann's flat a visit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OR: i have FUN making up my own lore
> 
> i bet you guys can't guess how much research i did on early airplane travel for this. technically i think only the UK offered legit international flights when this is set but this is, after all, a fic based on a movie about giant aliens, and i'm trusting that none of you are going to leave critical essays in the comments

Newt might have a fancy degree in paleontology, his name tacked on to a handful of fancy fossil exhibits in fancy museums, and a few fancy footnotes in most (if not all) major paleontology research journals, but he’s still, at heart, through and through, a biologist. It’s where he got his start. Childhood spend poking at squashed frogs on the side of the road and bawling his eyes out when his father tried to teach him how to gut a fish, adolescence spent sketching butterflies and wildflowers. He knows humans have instinctive ways of dealing with posed threats. Fight or flight. There are footsteps in Newt’s kitchen, quiet, slow, but _there_ , under circumstances in which there should not be footsteps in Newt’s kitchen, and they’re getting closer to Newt’s bedroom door with every creeping second. Newt knows (in terms of biology) he should either be bolting out the window or uncurling a coat hanger and charging right about now.

Predictably, of course, Newt does neither: he freezes in terror.

It takes him a good thirty seconds to snap out of it. At that point, knowing how long it’d take to jimmy open the latch on his window (fucking thing came painted shut), _fight_ seems to be his only option, so he looks around, frantically, for a weapon. He has a lamp on his bedside table. A small hunk of a fossil on his desk that would work but be a tremendous shame to damage, really, they’d never let him take his work home again. He suddenly wishes he hadn’t bothered tossing out those wine bottles the other night—in films, people are always getting smashed over the head with them or jabbed in the gut with a shattered end. 

The loose floorboard just outside Newt’s bedroom squeaks.

Lamp it is. Newt shoves Hermann’s journal into his jacket pocket and backs into the darkest corner, waiting, lamp held high like a baseball bat.

The footsteps stop, almost as if whoever is out there is waiting, too. Newt holds his breath as the door handle turns slowly; he can just make out two vague people-shapes stepping in.

Then he panics.

He lunges forward and hurls the lamp as hard as he can and, miraculously, makes contact. The lamp shatters; whoever it hits cries out and stumbles back against their companion, freeing the path to the doorway, and Newt—body pumping with adrenaline, and feeling vaguely like he’s about to start shrieking at the top of his lungs at any second—seizes his chance to high-tail it the _fuck_ out of there. He shoves his way past them blindly and through the door, through his pitch black kitchen and living room, and ducks just in time before something pings past his head and his sofa cushion erupts in feathers (holy shit, are they _shooting_ at him?), and finally out the front door. He shuts it behind him. Mostly out of habit.

“Okay,” he says aloud, hands on his knees, fully aware he has all of three seconds to decide where on Earth he’s supposed to go now, “okay, this is fine.”

Headlights peal down his street, and Jones’s shiny car is suddenly pulling up at the curb. “Hi,” Jones says. “Sorry I’m late. Get in.”

“Hi,” Newt says, shrilly, “what the hell?”

There are shouts inside his house. His front door swings open, flooding the yard with light, and Jones whips out a small pistol and shoots several rounds over Newt’s head at whoever’s there. Newt definitely doesn’t cower, or fall to his knees on the asphalt, or scream loudly. But, if he _did_ , he’d be justified.

“What the _hell?_ ” he repeats.

“Geiszler,” Jones says, reloading his pistol, “please get in the goddamn car.”

Newt jumps in.

They’re doing sixty out of Boston by the time Newt has finally calmed down enough to speak coherently, and in a voice that doesn’t threaten to shatter anyone’s windows. “Okay,” he says, “so, not to sound repetitive, but what the hell?”

“I _did_ warn you,” Jones says. “You and Gottlieb’ve got a hell of a paper trail. Whoever took your pal probably tracked you down, too. Maybe they think you know something. Or maybe,” he looks down pointedly at the conspicuous square in Newt’s pocket, and Newt’s hand goes to it automatically, “you have something they want.”

Guard this journal, Hermann said. Newt’s the only one he can trust. Newt drums his fingers on his knee anxiously. “What do we do, then?”

“Well,” Jones says, “you’ve got about two options: stay in town, or come with me. Chances are you’ll get shot either way, but they’re a lot smaller with me.”

“Comforting,” Newt says. “Guess I don’t really have a choice.” He settles into his seat miserably. He wonders what the university will think when two of their departments don’t show up tomorrow. Later today? And with bullet holes all over Newt’s apartment, bloodstains, maybe even _bodies,_ on his doorstep…

The sun begins to peek in pinks and oranges over the horizon about two hours into the drive. At least Newt thinks it’s been two hours; he dozed off for a bit at some point, only having woken up when Jones made a sharp turn, so his sense of time is a bit skewed. “Where are we going, anyway?” he says. They’re in Jersey—he can tell _that_ much from road signs—but that’s as far as he knows.

The corner of Jones’s mouth quirks up. “Ever been on an airplane, Geiszler?”

* * *

“How much are they _paying you_ at Marshall?”

Newt hasn’t, in fact, been on airplane before—he’s a boat travel man, longer but much less nerve-wracking and not nearly so _freezing_ , also it’s not like anyone was jumping over backwards to fund him enough for any other form of transportation in the first place—so he doesn’t have much to compare it to, but he’s fairly certain this is one of the much, much higher-end ones. There are tablecloths, and people dressed like waiters refilling the passengers’ wine glasses every twenty minutes, and a lounge, and Newt’s pretty sure they passed by _beds_ on the way to their seats. It’s like something out of the future, or one of those pulpy dimestore sci-fi novels.

Jones is leaning back in his seat, boots kicked up, all casual. “A lot of people owe me favors.”

The plane shakes and drops a bit, and Newt clings to his arm rests. “Novelty’s worn off,” he groans. “I definitely hate this. Oh my God. I’d rather get shot.”

“Relax,” Jones says cheerfully, and motions for an attendant to pour Newt more wine. “You might get your wish when we land.”

* * *

The plan (once Jones deigns to clue Newt in on it) is to head to Hermann’s abandoned apartment in Oxford to check it out for themselves, and see if they can find anything Jones’s friend missed. It’s about a two hour drive outside of London, a two hour drive _neither_ of them feel like making after the flight, _and_ they’d have to hunt around for a car to rent, so Jones manages to pull some strings and gets them a double room at an elegant, chic hotel in London, the foyer of which nearly gives gives Newt a heart attack when they step inside. When they’re shown to their room, he nearly has another. It’s bigger than his house. Better furnished, too, and with a better stocked bar, and a window with a view that’s gorgeous even at night. “Exactly _who_ ,” he says, pushing down lightly to test the springs of his mattress, “owes you favors?”

“Friend of mine is the manager here,” Jones says, swaggering over to the bar and pouring himself a drink. Newt can’t help but watch his throat as he swallows; damn him, he’s handsome. “Helped him out of a bit of trouble with a stolen painting, once.”

Stolen paintings. A _gun_. “I thought you were an _archaeologist_ ,” Newt says, incredulous. Jones winks and hands him a tumbler of scotch, and Newt—for all his earlier complaints about that certain type of booze—downs it fast. He’s still a bit jittery from the flight. When he hands Jones the empty glass back, Jones’s hand lingers atop his, his eyes cast down to Newt’s mouth. He brushes a bit of hair from Newt’s face.

It’s easy to go to bed with him again, if not just for the distraction it offers Newt, the warmth, the chance to take his mind off everything if just for a moment. Jones is strong and well-built, and his kisses are hot and his hands are rough, and he pretends he doesn’t notice when Newt closes his eyes and sighs out Hermann’s name.

Newt drifts to sleep, afterwards, time difference no match for how poorly he slept the night before, and, almost instantly, he’s back at the hotel with Hermann. It’s different again, though not in the same way as last time; they’re sitting at the table, teacups full, and Hermann looks older. Not by much. There are small lines at the corners of his eyes, tiny, nearly invisible stubble at his jaw, and an exhausted slump to his shoulders. He blinks at Newt, as if surprised, as if Newt’s just—fallen there, somehow. Like this isn’t Newt’s dream.

“I have to tell you,” Newt is saying, a well-rehearsed script.

“Listen to me,” Hermann interrupts him. He grabs Newt’s hand, and Newt—even in his subconscious—is startled at how _warm_ he is, how _real_ he feels. Like if Newt were to reach out, he could take Hermann into his arms. (He doesn’t, though. That’s not how this happened.) “Newton, listen to me.”

“You don’t have to respond—”

“I haven’t much time with the equipment before they come back—”

“—I just need you to know—”

“—it’s in the journal, the one I sent you, you’re _clever_ , darling, you can figure it _out_ —”

“I’m in love with you,” Newt finishes, and Hermann looks so _sad_.

“Newton,” he says, softly. He brings Newt’s hand to his mouth to kiss the back of it, once, a light brush of his wide lips. “Oh, Newton.” He looks panicked, suddenly, eyes darting towards the hotel room door like he expects it to swing open at any moment, and he lets go and jolts to his feet. He’s leaning more heavily on his cane than Newt remembers. He looks thinner, too. “Please,” he says, urgently, “the journal. You have to—”

“Can’t what?” Newt says. “Don’t you—”

Newt wakes with a gasp, jerking up ramrod straight. He’s aware, distantly, that his face is wet.

Jones stirs in the bed opposite Newt’s, blinking awake blearily. “Okay?” he slurs out.

“Sorry,” Newt says. He can still feel the ghost of Hermann’s kiss on his skin. “I had a, uh, weird dream.” 

Jones glances at the wall clock and groans quietly. “It’s almost eleven,” he says. “Guess we should be getting up anyway.” He sits up, duvet sliding down his chest, and rubs at his eyes. He swings both legs over the side of the mattress.

The dream is resting uneasily in Newt’s mind, and dredging up the memory of the one he had the night before along with it. He’d been a little busy to linger over it, then. “Hey,” he says, slowly, coloring prematurely at the ridiculous question he’s about to ask. (Hermann had just seemed so _solid_ , and _real_.) “Can—is sharing dreams a thing?”

Jones pauses.

* * *

Jones insists they order breakfast—really, lunch, Newt hasn’t slept this late since grad school—through room service. They arrange a car for Oxford (Jones had to leave his own chic one in the care of Newark, after all) and start trying to decode Hermann’s journal over coffee as they wait for it. “I’ve heard of people dreaming about each other at the same time, or having the _same_ dream,” Jones says, after swallowing a mouthful of toast, “but what you’re describing is—”

“Like he was there,” Newt says, gripping his mug of coffee. “Like he was really there.”

Jones swallows another bite of toast.

“I know I sound nuts,” Newt sighs.

“What happened,” Jones says gently, “ _exactly_?”

“We were—” Newt clears his throat. “It was an old conversation we had. Years ago. But, it was like— _I_ was dreaming, I was acting out my half, but he wasn’t. Like he stepped into my head, or something, and was having a completely different conversation.”

“And he told you it was in the journal,” Jones says. “Whatever ‘it’ is.”

“Yes. And he—” Newt brushes his fingers over the back of his hand. “—said something about equipment.”

Jones hums in thought. He slips his glasses on and begins to flip carefully through the latter half of Hermann’s journal—the one he sent Newt—where things get weird. He runs a finger slowly over a bit of what Newt takes to be Old English. “Damn,” he mutters. “I wish I had my library for this.”

Newt squints down at the page; there’s another drawing of one of those strange, serpentine monsters. Like the creatures Newt studies, only Hermann’s colored them in with vivid ink. A deep, neon blue that almost stings his eyes. “They’re like dragons,” he says. “Why is Hermann drawing _dragons_?”

There’s a buzz at the door, followed by a quick little knock; their car, presumably, is ready. “Grab your coat,” Jones says, and quickly finishes the rest of his toast. He crams a—vaguely silly-looking—fedora on his head. “We’ll find out.”

* * *

_...read about it in some rag called “Mystic Magazine”._ _It would be pretty handy, wouldn’t it? Close your eyes, and we’re in the same room, just like that. Actually, that’d be terrible, you’d just yell at me and I’d win even less arguments..._

_Fewer arguments._

_Did you seriously buy a stamp for one sentence?_

_Did you? I admit, it would be quite convenient, as ridiculous…_

* * *

Stepping into Hermann’s flat feels like an intimacy Newt doesn’t deserve. Even torn apart and covered in a fine layer of dust, it’s still so quintessentially _Hermann_ that Newt’s breath catches in his throat. The sitting room is lined with bookshelves—which, likely, were once neat, but whose contents have been thrown about the room; there’s a moldering cup of tea knocked on its side on the cushion of an ugly armchair; an antique desk, drawers half-open with papers sticking out and surface stained by the dried contents of an overturned inkwell, sits in front of the window.

Jones starts poking around at the books while Newt cautiously makes his way through to the kitchen. There’s a little round table with only two chairs, and a shriveled tomato plant sitting on the center of it. Aside from that, and the sickening smell of the months-old dirty dishes and garbage in the pail, the kitchen fares much better than the sitting room: identical teacups neatly line a shelf above the sink, a dish towel is folded on the counter, a kettle remains centered perfectly on a burner.

There’s a hallway that leads to what Newt presumes to be Hermann’s bedroom, and he almost can’t bring himself to open the door when he gets to it. It’s similarly ransacked, the bedclothes pulled off to the floor, mattress askew, drawers opened, clothing tossed about. There’s a sweater lying near Newt’s feet at the entrance, and he picks it up. Argyle, and ugly, but soft against his skin.

“Geiszler,” Jones calls, and Newt startles and wipes his eyes on the back of his hand.

He wanders back to the sitting room. Jones looks at him strangely; Newt realizes he’s still holding the sweater, but he can’t quite bring himself to put it down.

Jones waves a few sheets of paper at him and, with a jolt, Newt recognizes his own handwriting. “These were all over the floor, but hardly a spot of dust on them compared to the rest of this junk, so someone was looking at them _recently_. Guess we know for sure how your friends hunted you down.” Jones picks a few more up from the ground: there are dozens. Maybe hundreds. At least one for every week for four years. Newt—didn’t think Hermann would keep them all. Then again, it’s not like Newt didn’t keep all his, too.

He starts picking up books, just to have something to do with himself so he doesn’t have to see Jones’s sympathy. If they find Hermann— _when_ they find Hermann—he wouldn’t like the place to be a mess. 

“Geiszler—”

Newt picks up a heavy hardback, bound in a thick grey leather, and is about to slide it back on one of the shelves when the illustration on front makes him pause. It’s inked in a tarnished gold and faded with age, but it’s undoubtedly the same serpentine creature painstakingly rendered in Hermann’s journal. “Indy,” he says, “ _look_.”

The volume’s older than it looked at first— _much_ older—and it’s written in the same language as the phrases from Hermann’s journal. Not, as it turns out, Old English—

“It looks like some variation of Medieval Celtic,” Jones says, frowning. “But it doesn’t—well, it doesn’t really make sense, frankly.”

“What do you mean?”

“The monster on the cover,” Jones says, “looks like other illustrations of dragons from this period. But—” He frowns at Newt. “What do you know about dragons, Dr. Geiszler?”

Newt can’t help but laugh. “That they don’t exist?” he says. “That people were just seeing big lizards and getting excited. Or digging up dinosaur fossils. You know,” Newt is getting a little excited himself, but this _is_ what he studies, this is his specialty, “I wrote a whole—”

“ _Culturally_ ,” Jones corrects quickly.

“Oh.” Newt blinks. He thinks back to his undergrad literature gen-eds. “Burning down villages and stealing maidens?”

“Traditionally,” says Jones, and Newt can feel the lecture coming on, “in western civilizations—dragons were almost _always_ evil, or minions of the devil. Even as far back as eleventh century iconography of St. George, or—the hydra of Ancient Greece.”

“But they’re stories,” says Newt. “Myths. What does this have to do with the language, anyway?”

“I said it’s partially Celtic,” says Jones. “Some of it just looks like gibberish, but it’s not—it’s _worshiping_ dragons, if anything. Almost like a bible.” He’s frowning again, and points to a spot on the page; there’s another intricately penned serpentine creature, winding alongside a paragraph. “The word they use for ‘dragon’ is different, too: ‘kaiju’. Japanese. Not sure how the Celts got a hold of that, but…”

Why was Hermann writing about monsters? In all their letters, Hermann had never once hinted at any interest in the occult, but actively scorned Newt’s love of lurid pulp science-fiction and Universal Studio’s horror films _plenty_ of times.

“I can’t really make out too much of this,” says Jones, shutting the book with a sigh. “The dialect is something I’ve never seen before. It’s like there are bits and pieces of bunch of languages jumbled up in there.” Jones kicks at a Latin-to-English dictionary lying on the ground, its spine split as though it’d been thrown. “Maybe there’s something else in another one of these books that could help us.”

Hermann’s encyclopedias give no help under _dragon_ and don’t have an entry for _kaiju_ (not that they expected it); they don’t even bother going through his mathematics and astrophysics journals; the few random four-year-old copies of _Science Magazine_ offer nothing but textbook reviews and technological breakthroughs that Newt already knows. (Newt does, however, blush a bit when he finds that Hermann’s dog-eared a write-up on Newt’s work in Tanzania from a March 1936 edition of the magazine and a particularly boring article Newt published on citric acid in ‘34, and that he _had_ actually purchased some novels Newt had recommended to him even though he said he wouldn’t.)

They’re just about to give up when Newt finds a small red book wedged under the coffee table, titled _Cults and Fanatics_. “Hey,” he says, because next to poetry this is one of the least-Hermann things they could’ve found, “this could be something?”

It takes all of ten seconds to find an entry under _kaiju_. The large bookmark Hermann’s slipped in to mark the page helps.

“‘The cult of kaiju,’” Jones reads aloud, “‘dates as far back as 8th century BC, though it likely has roots beyond that as well. What makes its history so hard to trace is how widespread it is: evidence of rituals and writings span across continents from Europe to the Americas to Asia…’ They’re some sort of doomsday cult,” Jones says, scanning the rest of the page, “based upon worshiping these ‘great beasts’ from another world— _kaiju_ —that they believe are prophesied to walk the Earth again and bring about the apocalypse.”

“Again?”

“Dragons,” Jones says, a sardonic twist to his mouth, “aren’t myths to them. And your dinosaurs aren’t dinosaurs. Oh: ‘Central to the cult of kaiju,’” Jones continues reading, “‘is the belief that, like the beasts they worship, the cult is all connected in one great hivemind, sharing thoughts, memories, language, even dreams through a pocket in reality they call _the drift_.’ That would explain that odd dialect jumble.”

“Dreams?” Newt says, sharply.

“Dreams,” Jones repeats. “Your friend. He didn’t ever mention—”

“Hermann isn’t in a _cult_ ,” Newt snaps, far more aggressively than he’d meant to. There’s just no _way_. The man couldn’t even abide the horoscope column in newspapers.

“I didn’t say that,” Jones says, calm and even. “I just think it’s a bit of a funny coincidence.” He sets the book down on Hermann’s desk.

‘The drift’. “Hang on,” Newt says, and fishes Hermann’s journal out of his pocket. He skims past entry after entry until he reaches the sketches; there, written and underlined multiple times alongside the reproductions of the kaiju from the cover of the cult bible and several lines of almost-Celtic, is ‘ _the drift_ ’, with a question mark. He points at it. “He writes this a lot, in here,” Newt says. “He’s practically obsessed with it.” He flips to another page, one with lines and lines of equations, with the phrase written atop as well. The more Newt looks at it, though, the less it looks like equations and the more it looks like—some form of coding. Hermann had expressed an interest, back during their correspondence, in the work of one of Newt’s former colleagues who was following a Lovelacian line of scientific inquiry, but Newt didn’t know Hermann had breached into it himself. “What do you think—?”

Before Jones can spare more than a passing glance at the page, something heavy crashes through the front window and lands with a thud on the hardwood. “ _Shit_ ,” Jones hisses, and scrambles to grab the kaiju bible, _Cults and Fanatics_ , and—curiously—Newt’s arm. “Is there a kitchen door?” he says.

“Uh?” Newt blinks, trying to remember the layout of the room from his brief exploration. “I—I think?”

“Good enough for me,” Jones says. “Get your pal’s journal and anything else you don’t want to watch blow up.” Newt has just enough time to stuff the journal back in the inside pocket of his leather jacket and—after looking around frantically for _anything_ —grab the argyle sweater before Jones breaks into a run, towing Newt along with him. There _is_ a kitchen door, and they sprint out into sunlight, and Jones manhandles him behind a thick tree just in time for Hermann’s flat to _burst into flames_.

These have been the most disorienting few days of Newt’s life, hands-down.

“Someone tried to kill us,” Newt says, “ _again_.”

“You’re flattering me,” says Jones, “someone tried to kill _you_ again. Jesus,” he ducks out from behind the tree and stares at the smoldering wreckage, “where the hell did they get a grenade?”

Sirens start going off somewhere, and a black car identical to the one that lurked outside Newt’s apartment for days speeds down the street away from what’s left of the flat. “Probably the same place they’re getting the cars,” Newt says, pointing at it, and Jones spins just in time to watch it round a corner. “I think whoever broke into my place the other night had one just like it.”

Jones swears and snatches his hat from the grass. “To the car,” he says. “Hurry, or we’re gonna lose them.”

“We’re _following_ them?”

They are. Or they try to, anyway. By the time Jones hauls Newt over to the rented car, shoves him and the stack of books inside, and takes off after the black car, it's long gone.

* * *

_...and as for time travel, or—whatever nonsense you called it, dimensional travel—all I have to say is that you’ve been reading too many dime novels. There is nothing that would suggest…_

_...a complete square, just wait until someone invents a time machine, I’m going to rub it in your face a week ago. Did you really clip my article from the journal? I bet you stuck it up on your fridge, too, or in a little scrapbook. The “Newton Geiszler Is So Intelligent and Charming” page. Not even my grandmother would…_

_...believe you typed up a twelve-page paper on time travel out of spite. How much extra postage did you have to pay to account for the weight? Furthermore, if you dare cite H.G. Wells as a credible source again I am…_

_...but how much extra postage did_ _you_ _have to pay to send it back with corrections?_

* * *

When they get back to London after having given up the chase, it’s dusk and starting to storm. Jones downs more scotch, shrugs off his tweed, and invites Newt along for a shower with a little quirk of his head, but Newt—with little difficulty—declines. He’s exhausted from the day’s events (and from almost dying, again), and doesn’t bother undressing before he curls up under the expensive bedspread, one boot still on. Jones is whistling a Cole Porter song Newt can just make out over the steady stream of water, and between that and the gentle drumming of rain against the large windows Newt is lulled to sleep easily. He knows, somehow, he’ll be having the dream again, expects to see the floral wallpaper and wicker furniture of the hotel room in 1934 and Hermann's sallow face.

He’s not disappointed.

“I hope that’s a good thing, then,” Newt is saying, and he’s stirring in sugar and setting down chipped china and his hands are shaking, shaking harder than they were on the day, and Hermann is laughing and adoring, but his eyes are lined and deeply shadowed, and then he’s—

“I knew you would. You _are_ clever,” he says, and Newt is struck by how incredibly handsome he is.

“And you’re—” Newt is drumming his fingers. Hermann’s eyes light up, and he’d been reaching for the teacup, acting out his part, but he _freezes_.

“Is it—are you—?”

“Hermann,” says Newt, and Hermann is so _handsome,_ and Newt’s heart is pounding. “I have to tell you—”

The hope welling behind Hermann’s eyes shatters. “Not again,” he mutters, under his breath. “Please. It’s torture. I can’t—”

“—you don’t have to respond—”

Hermann looks as though he may throw the teacup to floor; he shakes his head, shuts his eyes, and the scene changes. They’re back at the lecture hall, and Hermann is wringing Newt’s hand like Newt is a movie star and looking at him with warm eyes and a blinding smile, and hazy, blurred faces are filing past them. 

( _It’s surreal_ , Hermann said. _Look at you, by God, it’s surreal_.)

“Look at _you_!” Newt laughs, and claps Hermann on the shoulder. He’s handsome, and Newt—

“I don’t understand why it isn’t _working_!” Hermann exclaims, and clings tighter to Newt’s hand. The hall flickers and fades around them: _Come upstairs_ , Newt is saying, and Hermann is blushing and looking to the floor—

_Look at you, by God—_

“Letters,” Newt is saying, and he’s the one clutching onto Hermann now, “like _usual_.”

“Listen,” Hermann begs, “listen to me, Newton. You have to be quick. You have to find me. Remember the essay you sent me? That absurd one—”

“I’ll quit my job,” Newt says, “and move to England.”

“—they have _ways_ of doing it. Dimensional travel. It’s my fault, I didn’t mean—”

“Come upstairs,” Newt says, while Hermann wrings his hand, and Hermann is blushing—

“—you have to be quick,” Hermann repeats. “I need you to—”

“—you just need to know—”

“—be quick—”

_—it’s surreal._

A door slams. Newt jerks awake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OG foonote i had in my google doc of this for "mystic magazine" lmao: here is where i became unnecessarily pissed at timelining because ‘true mystic science’ magazine (the kind of shit newt would definitely buy ironically) published an article on astral projection in the 1930s but the magazine wasn’t a thing until 1938 so i had to settle for the probably not-as-accurate november 1930 edition of this bad boy. the cover says “is your sweetheart true” so pretend he bought it for the 1930s occult magazine equivalent of early aughts “does he like you back” tiger beat quizzes
> 
> ALSO MY FRIEND DREW SOME AMAZING ART OF LAST CHAPTER...... [LOOK](https://twitter.com/chromatode/status/1153436594394882048?s=20)


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